Start up day 1, Tuesday, August 4, 2009.

I retired from teaching at the University of Wisconsin in Stevens Point in late August, 2008. In the intervening year I have been hard at work determining the work I now want to do. That task is ongoing for me and perhaps for many others. Ortega says in effect that life is always about deciding what to do next. I feel some accord with that view. Two years of high school teaching in the mid-sixties and 39 years "professoring" at the university yield thousands of lives with which I have intersected and transacted. A significant amount of public presentation in and out of the United States , organizational training, consulting, membership in community organizations, a near decade pastoring while too young for the wisdom required, and never fully up to the wisdom desired, have now yielded lessons taught to me by very bright and high integrity people of all ages. Always a reader and graced with parents who read and filled the houses of my growing up with books, magazines, art, and open minded conversation, I now find my self needing to transcend polemics, synthesize a massive pile of information, find out where I want to ground my remaining life in a solid and attractive structure to face life and death and to be a good ancestor. My grandson, with one more year of high school, plus my three daughters, two son in laws, a few close friends, my brothers and sisters, a few in laws with whom I am close, should get more value from my life and shared experience than I have managed to proffer and manifest thus far. I hope a blog will motivate me to write a bit and seek to capture and express more of what is in me. I may find it is not much. However, my Dad during the season of his dying sat with me and said he found himself believing more and more about less and less. Maybe the less I find will be worthy of greater commitment and acceptance. I shall see. You may.